Real-time marketing and business management is upon us. Companies that get the notion of instantly creating and responding, almost as a business behavior, are taking advantage of opportunities as they happen and engaging customers at the speed they’ve come to expect.

The days of annual planning and execution as a ritualistic process are thing of the past. Companies must plan and implement almost instantly – companies big and small. The good news is that by adopting the right mindset and the right set of monitoring tools, even the smallest of organizations can beat the competition to opportunities happening in real-time.

Real-Time Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott

For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I spoke with David Meerman Scott author of numerous books on marketing and PR including his most recent release – Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Consumers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now

Scott’s books are always very practical and full of real world examples and Real-Time Marketing and PR is no exception. Scott calls this his most important book to date and, allowing for some normal author blustering, I have to agree. This is a subject that will dominate the way businesses begin to view their world and only increase in importance as instantly becomes the new fast.

As part of the research for the book Scott reached out to the top 100 of the Fortune 500 companies asking each company to explain how it had adapted to the new realities of the real-time Web. Only 28 companies responded.

Surprisingly, the companies that do engage in real-time communications outperformed the S&P 500 stock index while the others underperformed the index. The research suggests the power of a real-time mindset.